1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a system and method to avoid disk lube pooling. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for tracking an amount of accesses to target tracks included on a hard drive and scanning their adjacent tracks after an excessive amount of accesses to the target tracks in order to uniformly redistribute the lubrication from the adjacent tracks to the target track.
2. Description of the Related Art
Specialized computers are beginning to replace traditional appliances to perform specialized tasks. For example, specialized computers commonly perform tasks that cash registers, information booths, and kiosks once performed. These specialized computers typically execute an application-specific program for repeatedly performing a few of the same type of functions. A challenge found, however, is that problems arise in particular components when the application-specific program repeatedly performs only a few tasks.
One such problem is that the application-specific programs repeatedly write to a select number of tracks on a hard drive. For example, a cash register program may repeatedly store the amount of money that should be in the cash register after each transaction in a particular track. A challenge found with excessive accesses to a particular hard drive track is that lubrication on the hard drive looses its uniform distribution on the surface of the hard drive. Over time, constant writing to a target track results in the lubrication thinning over the target track and pooling on adjacent tracks, similar to plowing snow on a road. This pooling creates problems when the head moves to different tracks because the head either hits the “bumps,” or the lube collects on the head, reducing its sensitivity.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to uniformly redistribute the hard drive's lubrication without impacting system performance.